Sunday, April 23, 2017

Faith in the Risen Lord (a sermon for April 23rd)

At some time or other, most of us
have probably used the phrase ‘Get a life’. If you’re a literal thinker, that’s
actually a rather strange thing to say. All the people we say it to are, in
fact, already alive: their hearts are beating, the blood is coursing through
their veins, and their brains are more or less in working order.

But of course, that’s not what
the phrase is all about. We all know instinctively that it’s possible to be
biologically alive – ‘alive’ in the medical sense – and yet not to be enjoying
everything life has to offer. It’s possible to get so caught up in foolishness
and deception that we’re missing out on the most important things. And so we
say ‘Get a life’, meaning ‘Smarten up! Don’t sweat the small stuff! Make sure
you concentrate on the best things, the most important things’. After all, as
my friend Harold Percy says, no one wants to be in the situation where God
writes on their tombstone the words ‘Brilliant performance, but she missed the
whole point!’

This is what John is talking
about in our gospel reading for today:

‘Now Jesus did many other signs
in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these
are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son
of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (John
20:30-31).

John wants us to ‘get a life’,
and he says the way to do that is to put your faith in Jesus as the Messiah. If
we believe in him and follow him, we will experience life to the full, the way
God intended when he created us in the first place.

But there was a problem with ‘believing
in Jesus as the Messiah’ for the first followers of Jesus. The word ‘Messiah’
(or ‘Christ’ in Greek) meant ‘the king God promised to send to set his people
free’. In popular Jewish belief in the time of Jesus, ‘Messiah’ didn’t mean ‘someone who came to die on
a cross so we could be forgiven’. It meant King Arthur, or Aragorn son of
Arathorn, or King David – a powerful military leader who would raise an army in
the name of God, drive out the forces of evil and set up God’s kingdom on earth
by force. If you were the true Messiah, God would help you do this. On the
other hand, if you were defeated – if you were killed by your enemies – that
was a pretty good sign that you were faking it: you weren’t the true Messiah.

That’s why the Resurrection was
so vital to the faith of those early Christians. If Jesus had stayed dead, they would probably have
abandoned their belief in him as God’s Messiah. The Christian movement would
never have gotten started, and Jesus would have been an interesting character
studied by historians, but certainly not worshipped as the Son of God by two
billion people around the world today.

But the New Testament witness is
that those early Christians saw Jesus again in the flesh, alive and well, after
they had seen him die. All four gospels record eyewitness stories. So does Paul
in 1 Corinthians. Mary Magdalene saw him. So did Peter. So did the couple who
met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and the ten disciples in the Upper Room (and
probably a few more with them), and Thomas the doubter, and a group of them
fishing on the lake of Galilee, and another group of five hundred of them all
together at once. These are some of the eyewitness stories recorded, or alluded
to, in the New Testament.

One of them especially stands out
in the Gospel for today. We all love ‘doubting Thomas’, because he’s so much
like us. “I’d like to believe, Lord, but I just can’t! Just let me see with my
eyes – let me touch your wounds – then I’ll believe!” He’s so honest; he’s
unwilling to pretend he has one ounce more faith than he actually has! And
incredibly, Jesus loves him so much that he gives him what he asks for.

‘Jesus came among them and said
“Peace be with you”. Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my
hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe”
(vv.26b-27).

The story doesn’t record that
Thomas actually did that – reached
out his hands to touch Jesus. Instead he falls at his feet and exclaims “My
Lord and my God!” (v.28). And then Jesus says something tremendously
significant:

“Have you believed because you
have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”
(v.29).

That’s us, you see! Verse 20 says
‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ – but how can that verse
apply to us? We’ve never seen the risen Lord. Like Thomas, we long to see him
and touch him. If only he’d appear to us like he did to Paul on the road to
Damascus! And so when it comes to faith we think of ourselves as second class
Christians. We can’t really share the fullness of joy of those first witnesses;
we can’t enjoy ‘life in his name’ in the same way they did.

Not so, says Jesus. The same
blessing applies to us as to them; “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet
have come to believe”. As St. Paul says in one of his letters, we walk by
faith, not by sight.

Which, by the way, is a perfectly
reasonable thing to do – and something we all do in certain areas of our lives.
For instance, I believe in the existence of a planet called Pluto. I’ve never
seen it with my own eyes, and I don’t expect to either. I don’t have the time
or money to undertake the astronomical study I’d need to do. But credible
astronomers have told me that Pluto exists; I believe their testimony, and so
when someone asks me, I say, “Yes, I believe in Pluto”.

I also believe my wife loves me.
I can’t see love or quantify it, but
she tells me she loves me, and her actions seem to confirm the fact.

Well, that’s self-evident, you
might say. To which I reply, not necessarily so. She might just have pretended
to love me, and married me so she could get rich! All right, I admit that in
our case that’s unlikely – but you can see that in some cases it would be an
issue. Does Kate Middleton really love Prince William – or does she just enjoy
all the attention she gets as Duchess of Cambridge? You see, evidence can
sometimes be read in more than one way. In Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello’ a man
is persuaded to believe in the infidelity of his wife by the lies of a false
friend. We, the audience, can’t believe he’s falling for it; Desdemona so
obviously loves and is faithful to her husband. But Othello is persuaded to
read the evidence differently, and the result is a very sad end for them both.

It’s the same with Pluto;
apparently the evidence can be read more than one way. I was raised to believe
that there were nine planets, but a few years ago astronomers changed their
minds – no, Pluto’s not really a planet after all! And then a few years later,
some of them said “Well, it depends how you define ‘planet’!” So again, the
evidence can be read in more than one way. It might be persuasive, but it’s not
conclusive. In the end, we make a choice
about things like this.

So why do we modern Christians,
who have not seen the Risen Lord with our own eyes, choose to believe he is
alive today? Let me suggest some answers to that question.

Some would say, “I
believe it because that’s what I was taught when I was growing up”. And
that’s undoubtedly very common and very valid. Many of us Christian parents
hope that’s what will happen with our kids. Christ is very important to us –
the most important part of our lives, many of us would say – and we want our
kids to know and love him as well. So we pray for them, and bring them to
church, and teach them the Bible story and the Christian way of life.

But lots of kids part company
with things their parents teach them; it’s a natural part of growing up. As we
get older, we learn to think for ourselves and make our own decisions. As
adults, we decide which parts of our parents’ belief systems ring true for us,
and which don’t. I’m a Christian today, but my Christian faith is not exactly
the same as the faith of my parents. And that’s as it should be; otherwise it
wouldn’t be my faith, it would be their faith, one step removed.

And that’s why I don’t think this
can be an adequate answer in the long run. If the only reason I continue to
believe in the resurrection is because that’s what my parents taught me, I
think sooner or later that faith will fail. We have to go through a process of
making that faith our own, and inevitably this will involve questioning and
rethinking things.

Why do we believe in the
resurrection today? Some would say, “I’ve examined the evidence and I find it
compelling”. This was the approach of Frank Morison, a British writer
who published a well-known book in 1930 called Who Moved the Stone? The first chapter was entitled, ‘The Book that
Refused to be Written’. In it he described how he had been sceptical about the
resurrection of Jesus and had set out to write a short paper disproving it.
However, the more he read and researched and sifted through the evidence, the
more he came to believe that the resurrection was well-founded. The book has
been reprinted many times since then, and apparently many people have become
Christians as a result of reading it.

Again, this can be very valuable,
and I have to say I share Morison’s view. How do we explain the empty tomb? How
do we explain the eyewitness stories? How do we explain the change in the
disciples? I don’t have time to go into it this morning, but suffice it to say
that many of us find the weight of evidence to be very firmly on the side of
the truth of the resurrection. It’s not conclusive of course – if it was,
everyone would believe – but it’s a lot more persuasive than many people think.

So some believe because that’s
what their parents taught them, and some believe because they’ve examined the
evidence and been convinced by it. Some, however, are impatient with all these
logical arguments. They would say, “I believe because I’ve met the risen Jesus
myself”. Archbishop Anthony Bloom was one of those people. He was a
medical student in Paris during World War Two, and not a believer. One day,
however. he went to hear a talk about the gospels given by a priest, and he was
surprised and disturbed to find himself attracted by what the man said. This
made him angry, but he couldn’t dismiss it. So when he went home, he sat down
at his desk to read the gospel of Mark. He had only just begun to read, he
said, when he became strongly aware of a presence in the room with him; he
couldn’t see anyone, but he was as sure that there was someone there as he was
of his own existence, and he knew instinctively that it was the risen Christ.
This experience – not logical argument – was powerful enough to turn this
agnostic into a Christian.

Some Christians do have
experiences like that. Most of us don’t; our sense of the presence of Christ is
more subtle. For me, I find that most of the time he’s there quietly in the
background; I don’t tend to notice him unless I stop and pay attention, and
then I realize he’s been there all the time. And I find that intriguing. Once
again, I can choose to ignore him if I want, and the more I do that, the less
obvious he is. But if I choose to pay attention to him, over time, my sense of
him seems to grow.

But there’s one more reason for
faith I’d like to share with you this morning. For me, this is the most
powerful one. There’s a scene in John chapter six where disciples start leaving
Jesus because they can’t make sense of what he’s saying about eating his flesh
and drinking his blood; its offensive and revolting to them.

‘So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do
you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go?
You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you
are the Holy One of God”’ (John 6:67-69).

These verses really ring true for
me. I
believe in Jesus because I find his life and teaching so compelling.
When he says, ‘What good is it to you to gain the whole world and lose your
soul?’ my heart is shouting out a big ‘Amen!’ When he says, ‘a person’s life
doesn’t consist of the abundance of their possessions’, it’s obvious to me that
that’s true. When he says that the most important things in life are to love
God and love your neighbour, I think, “Well, duh! Of course! Why can’t everyone
see that?”

And it’s not just his words -
it’s his life too. The way he reaches out to everyone, rich and poor, men and
women, sinners and saints. The way he loves the people no one else loves. The
way he includes women and children. The way he refuses to hate people his
society tells him he should hate, like enemy soldiers or tax collectors.
Hebrews tells us that Jesus is ‘the image of the invisible God’, and I believe
that to be profoundly true; I just know in my heart that if there is a God, he
has to be like Jesus. ‘Like Father, like Son’.

‘These (things) are written so
that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and
that through believing you may have life in his name’. Jesus says, “I came that
they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). To put your faith in
Jesus and follow him is to have life, abundant life. The disciples rejoiced
when they saw the risen Lord, but we rejoice too, even though we have not seen
him with our eyes, because we believe he is alive and we are doing our best to
walk with him day by day.

Let me close with an invitation;
two invitations, in fact.

First, let me to invite you to
ask yourself, “Why do I believe in the risen Lord? Is it just because that’s
what my parents taught me? Is it because I’ve thought things through, examined
the evidence and been convinced by it? Is it because I’ve had an experience of
his presence in my life? Is it because I find his life and teaching so
compelling? Or is it some other reason?” Probably, for most of us, the answer
to that question will include a story of some kind – the story of our faith
journey.

Second, let me invite you to make
a fresh commitment of faith today. In a few minutes we’re going to join with
the parents and godparents of Sloane, Steven and Kai as they make the baptismal
covenant with God on behalf of their kids. I will ask them, “Do you believe in
God…in Jesus…in the Holy Spirit” and ‘will you commit yourself to the Christian
way of life as a member of the Church of Christ?’Those promises can basically be summed up in
the words “Jesus is my Lord, and I will follow him along with my fellow
Christians”.

So make that commitment of faith
again today. Say the words along with the parents and godparents. And then when
we come to communion, dip your fingers in the water of the baptismal font and
make the sign of the cross as a symbol of your faith and commitment to Jesus.
And then, when our service is over, you can leave this place with joy, knowing that
Jesus is alive, that he is Lord of all, and that your life is in his hands.